Lagging Behind

This article engages with the temporality of modernity and particularly modern mass culture, focusing on the 1910s revue theater scene in New York City. Following the lead of modernist theories of mass culture, it reads the dance revue as emblematic of modernity. Yet earlier theories of modernity (such as Siegfried Kracauer's seminal 1927 essay "The Mass Ornament") concentrated exclusively on the white revue, whereas this article takes a comparative approach. It reflects on the work of a Black troupe, the Darktown Follies, and moves from there to think about the repercussions between the white and Black performative practices of the time. By extension, the article explores how Black performative practices disclose a notion of modernity at odds with the prevailing idea of "the modern": looped rather than linear, recursive rather than progressive. Where the white revue signals the future, the Black revue acknowledges the presence of the past and the past in the presence. This invocation of the past accentuates a different notion of time and elicits a different notion of modernity: backward modernity.

Black performance · Black theatre · Mass culture · Modernity · New York City theatre · recursion · Siegfried Kracauer · Temporality · Modernist Literature and Criticism · Theater, Performance, and Music History · Theatre and Performance Studies